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So good evening, friends, colleagues, it's a great privilege to to introduce David Luban to give the first of this this year's terror lectures,

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or as we know, all traditions are invented. So in line with the invention of tradition, the terror lectures already invented tradition and a new one,

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but one that we're very happy to welcome to Oxford and to the history of art department.

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Perhaps I should just say a little bit about the context of this. The Terra Foundation for American Art, based in Chicago,

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has very generously funded a visiting professorship in American art for the current year and next year.

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And we hope this will be an ongoing project. The principal aim of the terror visiting professorship is to embed within the history of our

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department the teaching of American art at both undergraduate and taught postgraduate level.

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David Lubin, who is the distinguished holder of this position for the first time,

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is busily teaching a way master students and this term history of our undergraduate students.

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But it seemed a terrible shame to have such a distinguished historian of American art

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here amongst us in Oxford and not give a wider community a chance to hear from him.

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So David was very generous in saying yes to the suggestion that he should speak to us.

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And so we have set up this small series of four lectures in which he will be talking to us on the theme of Picturing a Nation.

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David comes to us from Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

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But even more importantly, he comes to us as really one of the most significant living historians of American art.

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Who's ranged very broadly across that field. So we're delighted to have him inaugurating this.

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Some of you may have been at his lecture in the Rothermere American Institute.

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His most recent book deals with American artists and the First World War,

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particularly timely given that this year marks the 100th anniversary of the United States entry into the First World War.

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And it's a theme related to war that he's going to talk to us about tonight to kick off the first of these four lectures,

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writing into history, marching into oblivion, the civil war, racial justice and the Shaw Memorial.

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So please welcome to the podium Professor David Leupen. Thank you, everybody, for turning out on this rotten afternoon, try to.

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Well, at least for me, it's not what I thought of. This may. Should that may.

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Should be in Britain. But anyway. All right. So, yes.

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So this to end is light. OK, on the screen.

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It's fine. Good. Thank you. In the first and the first several decades following the Civil War, Lipps glasses are fine.

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Sorry we start that over with a pair of glasses I hope will stay on.

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In the first several decades following the Civil War, the Irish born American sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens,

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shown here early and late in his career, spoke to his contemporaries with large public works that engaged their minds and moved their spirits.

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Not all the pieces he sculpted were actually memorials. But many of the best were as here, for example, the famous monument.

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To Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a young white abolitionist from Boston and the all black Civil War Regiment he commanded since antiquity,

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the medium of sculpture has been an ideal mode for memorialising the dead because the substances involved are relatively stable and permanent,

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intended to withstand the diminishment of time. St. Gaudens was 19th century America's greatest sculptor of memory.

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He moulded and shape the past for Americans in ways that many that may or may not have been historically accurate,

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but which were always visually compelling and emotionally resonant.

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My lecture this afternoon will explore some of the most important of these monuments and memorials and

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try to understand how they affected Northerners collective memory of the recent national cataclysm.

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St. Gaudens didn't start off his career with civil war representation. First, he made his name with intimate sculptural portraits.

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This was a bold move for centuries. Oil painting, not sculpture, had been the medium par excellence for conveying the personality of sitters.

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It even though St. Gordon's toiled instead with notoriously stiff and obdurate materials such as marble and bronze,

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he often managed as well as any painter to endow his sisters with nuances of life.

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Here, for example, is a small bronze portrait. Only seven inches high of his friend, Charles McKim.

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The noted American renaissance architect in here.

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Considerably larger at two by two feet by three is a double portrait of the novelist William Deane Haoles and his daughter Mildred,

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saying Gordon's delicate three quarter length portrait of Sarah Redwood Lee,

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the daughter of a friend, balances elements of forthrightness and reticence,

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perhaps like the 16 year old subject herself, whom he shows poised between girlhood and womanhood.

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Looking back from the end of his life, he singled this out as one of the best portraits he ever made.

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This extraordinary bar relief is from his portrait of Marianna Griswold Van Rensselaer.

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She was an influential art critic of the time who championed his work.

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And this is from his wedding portrait of Bessie Smith White, the bride of his friend and colleague, Stanford White,

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another eminent American renaissance architect and a partner with Charles McKim in the firm of McKim,

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Mead and White, one of the best of the artist's early sculptural reliefs.

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Is Louise Miller Howland. The panel, which is about three feet high.

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Shows an attractive middle aged woman standing beside a piano, on top of which sheet music has been gathered in an untidy pile.

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She entwines her hands loosely before her and seems to focus her attention elsewhere.

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This is the parlour world described by St. Gordon's as contemporary Thomas Aikens in paintings such as Elizabeth at the Piano.

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We're here singing a pathetic song, but no music is being performed.

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It has been set aside as the subject turns her head toward another realm.

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Louise Miller Howland was deceased when her widowed husband commissioned St. Gaudens to sculpt this work,

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and it poignantly conveys a sense of life interrupted. Another intimate portrait, relief.

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The St. Gaudens modelled this time later this time.

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Later in mid career was not originally intended as a memorial.

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In 1887, he met and sculpted the ailing Scottish poet and storyteller Robert Lewis Stevenson

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during the author's stopover visit in New York on his way to the South Pacific,

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where he hoped to recover from chronic lung disease. The resulting bronze medallion shows the slender, long haired Scotsman writing in bed,

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propped up by pillows with the pages of a manuscript balanced on his tented knees.

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It's probably the most charming sculpture ever made of a writer at work fun, intimate, behind the scenes.

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And he had it's also sweet and touching a snapshot or cameo of a bed ridden author who manages,

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nevertheless to transformed his enforced indolence into imaginative play.

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The image St. Gaudens rendered of Stevenson was irresistible and quickly became well-known and often reproduced,

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ultimately defining the way the future generations of Stephensons readers pictured him were in keeping with my theme.

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Remembered him in their mind's eye. A decade after the storyteller's death in Samoa in 1894,

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a committee in his hometown of Edinburgh commissioned St Gordon's to convert the medallion into a matau into a moral plaque for St Giles Cathedral.

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Thus, what had begun as a private portrait became a public monument.

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Likewise, Stephen S. Gordon's statue for the grave of Henry Adams recently decisive deceased wife Marion,

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a work of intense feeling and profound inscrutability eventually became despite the widower's wishes.

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A tourist attraction in Washington, where it was installed in 1891.

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In a quiet cemetery grove. Adams, a distinguished historian and the direct descendant of two U.S. presidents,

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was a deeply self questioning individual who rejected the reigning pieties of his time, be they religious, social or political.

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He was drawn to Buddhist and Hindu teachings about Nirvana were nothingness.

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And he wanted his wife's grave. And eventually his own to be marked by a reminder of life's unfathomable mysteries and ambiguities.

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St. Gaudens obliged him brilliantly. As a consequence turn of the century,

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visitors to the Adams Memorial mused on the nature and meaning of the shrouded

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figure debated at sex and wondered what dark secrets of the future foretold.

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The first memorial that St. Gaudens specifically intended for public consumption.

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The Feragut Memorial was unveiled in New York's Madison Square 10 years earlier in 1881.

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The feragut monument was in certain ways the exact opposite of the Adams Memorial.

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For here, the scarps, the sculptural figure on display in Denn engendered in viewers not a mood of doubt and perplexity, but of supreme confidence.

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The recently deceased commander of the union, Navy Admiral David G.

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Feragut, was legendary during the Civil War for his bravery under fire as envisioned here in his colour lithograph depicting the Battle of Mobile Bay.

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That's him leaning from the rigging.

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In the economic boom and bust years that followed the war, frigates rallying cry to his fleet, that mobile mobile bay.

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Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, entered the lexicon as the phrase the best embody the intrepid.

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Go ahead, Spirit. The Gilded Age Americans believed we'd see them through to greater and greater triumphs.

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By encapsulating this spirit in a powerful and heroic visual image, St. Gaudens is monument,

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which instantly became famous and gave the sculptor widespread fame,

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provided Americans, at least those from the victorious North, with a flattering image of themselves in their recent collective past.

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Feragut specifically alludes to Donna Talos, early Renaissance sculptural masterpiece of another legendary warrior, St. George.

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The admiral shown here in a plaster reduction, stands resolute as if on the bridge of a naval vessel, his face defiantly into the wind.

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He faces defiantly into the wind, which St. Gaudens definitely indicates.

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By the parting of the coat at his knees. This serves at once as a realistic detail and a subtle reference to ancient Greek sculpture,

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which revelled in the rendition of Aperol blown back or thrown open by the wind,

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as in the Lou's great historic Hellenistic masterpiece, The Nikkei of Sammeth race from the second century B.C.

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S. Gordon said much admired this work during his student days in Paris, Nikkei, the goddess of victory, is shown at the moment.

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She is descended from the heavens to the prowl of a ship that she, too, like.

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The old admiral, is a ship born and windblown. Wrote one admirer.

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Quote, The admiral stands perfectly still. His hands are not raised in gesture.

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His mouth is not open. But he is so much a man that he holds one's attention instantly and he is so quiet that he seems to move.

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The artist succeeded in making him almost quiver with pulsating life.

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Saying guidances standing Lincoln unveiled in Chicago in 1887 and on a base designed by Stanford White when even greater acclaim,

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the Lilliputian figure you see standing beside the empty chair is the sculptor himself.

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With this monument, he provided his contemporaries a remarkable visual image by which to remember or if you will, misremember their recent past.

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Indeed,

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this is the statue most responsible for creating the iconic image of Lincoln that we have today as rendered in film fiction and five dollar bill.

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The tall, lanky, craggy faced, awed or shambling forward to speak, his brow ponderous with thought,

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his clothes wrinkled as if only from as if not only from normal wear, but also the weight of responsibility bearing down on his shoulders.

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Up until St. Gaudens entered the field, Lincoln monuments typically showed him as the Great Emancipator with free Negro slaves grovelling at his feet.

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They served up a Lincoln that, to our eyes seems outlandishly faux and sentimental, perhaps even insufferable.

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With their declamatory gestures and pious expressions, they lack the grabby tongues and leonine presence of St. Gaudens.

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Later, rendition. Given what they were used to, viewers were dumbstruck by what they took to be extraordinary realism of the standing Lincoln.

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How did St. Gaudens achieve that effect? They wondered, at least in part.

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He did so through concerted research like a method actor preparing a role, although in this case, a role to be played by his statue.

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The sculptor immersed himself in Lincoln's letters and speeches,

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read all the current biographies of the man and the memoirs by those who knew him intimately pored over the many daguerreotypes

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for which the president had posed and even went so far as to examine 1860 life casts of Lincoln's face and hands.

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That had recently come to light. Gordon's exploits an array of small external details and gestures to convey the rich inner life of the man.

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For example, the wrinkling of his vest echoes the wrinkling of his brow.

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His head is downturned as if in thought. In this regard, he resembles the figure that Thomas ECNs portrayed.

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Thirteen years later, in nineteen hundred for a portrait known as The Thinker,

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Aikens similarly depicts a tall, lanky, solitary individual rumpled in clothing in plunged in thought.

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The watch Tchang watch chain hanging across Lincoln's torso serves as a momentum, more eye,

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an iconographic reminder of the chains of time and hence the premature amant mortality

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that tragically awaited the president from the moment he took his first fate.

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His fatal first step forward into the office that would eventually consume his life.

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His left hand clutches at his lapel, a gesture saying Gordon's learnt that was common for Lincoln when making speeches.

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The right hand balled in a fist disappears behind his back.

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This retraction of the hand behind the back was unheard of in public sculpture.

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And at length apiece, a startling air of mystery, tension and suppressed power.

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Perhaps the most extraordinary element was the vacant seat behind the orator.

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This was a novel idea for public sculpture, a standing figure beside an empty seat.

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It bespeaks absence. Someone was sitting there in his doing so no longer.

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He has moved on. This is similar to the metaphore a come underline.

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Louise Miller Howland. The relief portrait we examined earlier in which the deceased woman who is being memorialised

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seems to have gotten up from her piano and turned toward another plane of existence.

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On one level of interpretation,

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Lincoln has abandoned the safe confines of his chair to advance his carefully chosen and intensely resisted plans for the union.

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But on another level, he has begun his transition into immortality,

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a notion that was conveyed by the war secretary Edward Stanton's famous remark made at the president's deathbed.

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Now he belongs to the ages. The power of the standing Lincoln for St. Gaudens is contemporaries.

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Was that it managed to appear real and authentic while at the same time transcendent, an embodiment of moral, even spiritual strength.

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What was lost, however, in this new naturalistic view of Lincoln?

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Lincoln, the man rather than the saint, was his role as Emancipator.

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As we have seen those earlier, highly sentimental sculptural groups were racially condescending.

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And yet, for all of that, they acknowledged the all important fact that was systematically erased.

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Later in the 19th century, which is that the civil war was waged first and foremost over slavery by 1887 after the collapse

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of reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow racism throughout the north as well as the South,

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most American white Americans wanted to minimise the importance of slavery as the cause of the war.

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Instead, they preferred to see the upheaval as an honourable and heroic clash of political philosophies,

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which Lincoln gave his life to resolve by forsaking his predecessor's insistence on showing Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

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Saint Gaudens helped to shift the public's memory of the president to that of the great unifier instead.

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And in so doing, hastened the disappearance of racial justice for the national agenda.

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In the early 80s 90s, the sculptor received the commission to create a monument to one of the civil wars most controversial military leaders,

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William to come, says Sherman, who had just died. Sherman, as you know, was the union general who besieged Atlanta in 1864, and after starving,

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the populace burnt the city to the ground, cutting a swath 60 miles wide on their march from Atlanta to the sea.

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His forces some 60000 strong laid waste not only to public buildings and railways, but also to vast amounts of property.

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Civilian casualties were high. Homes were torched, fields trampled.

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Women harassed and raped. Here was the first instance in history of what historians now call total war.

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This was state sanctioned violence against the civilian population as part of a larger military campaign.

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Historically, it was an unprecedented act of terrorism. Needless to say, that was not to be the focus of the monument dedicated to his memory.

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Not long before his death, Surman Sherman sat for a portrait bust facing Gordon's,

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although it smoothes away the rough edges of the dishevelled and beetle browed general as memorably recorded in civil war era photographs.

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It conveys, nonetheless, a sense of quiet agitation.

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St. Gordon's scholar Thayer Tolis writes that the sculptor's contemporaries, quote, marvelled at how the portraits truthful appearance,

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the parted lips, weathered skin, bristled beer and a beard in a stew and askew cravat so forcefully captured the nervous power of the SIDOR.

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When the Sherman Monument was unveiled in New York in 1983, critics considered it the sculptor's masterpiece,

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an equestrian statue to be ranked on a par with the great Italian renaissance prototypes.

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Donatello's got to Malaita and Pride in Padua, which I show here, and Viro Skios Equality only in Venice.

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Angled forward on his charger, boots, piercing the stirrups, military cape swooping back in the wind.

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Determination stamped across his face.

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St. Gaudens is Sherman epitomises the Nietzsche and Wilt power that many early 20th century observers regarded as the special genius of America.

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In 1983, President Theodore Roosevelt famously described his form, his foreign policy as speaking softly and carrying a big stick.

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As an equestrian group, the Sherman Monument conveys something to the same idea with the surging power of the mounted

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rider prefaced and mollified by the virginal beauty and innocence of the winged victory.

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Again, St. Gaudens invokes the Nikkei of of Sammeth race, this time explicitly.

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Crowned in Laurel and Krass and clasping a Palm branch.

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A symbol of victory. St. is Nikkei amounts to a public relations advance man or advance woman.

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Her job is to soften or even disguise the raw brute power of American military and industrial

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might as embodied by the fearsome Yankee general who brought the Confederacy to its knees.

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Less this seem like an anachronistic interpretation.

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I should note that Southerners at the time mocked the sermon on the sermon mocking sorry, mocked the sermon monument,

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saying it was, quote, just like a northerner to send a woman ahead of him so nobody could shoot.

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Henry James, writing in 1986, was similarly unimpressed with the monuments counterbalancing of warlike masculinity and idealised femininity.

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He thought that the grim general straining into the breeze or in his words, the enemy blast, was a brilliant personification of the brutality of war.

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And that same guidance should have left it at that.

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What James objected to was the addition of what he called, quote, the form of a beautiful American girl.

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The artificial pairing of the Cape to conquer with a radiant virgin serves, as James put it, puts it, quote, to confound destroyers with benefactors.

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He believed that a war monument requires greater fidelity to history.

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He said, I would have Schurman deadly and terrible a war.

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God quested with snakes, not irradiating benevolence, but signified by every ingenious device, the misery, the rune and the vengeance of his track.

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Victory, James's beautiful American girl, as shown here in a detailed from a gilded bronze reduction,

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was the last in a long line of idealised goddesses and angels.

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The Saint Gorton's used to embellish his memorials, his angels for the Morgan tomb, which were destroyed by fire in 1884.

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His caryatids for the Vanderbilt mansion fant fireplace shown here on the left.

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And here's a more Caritas toss on the right were highly influential in the way that late 19th and early

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20th century Americans envisioned ideal feminine beauty as something almost androgynous in nature.

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As in these two paintings by the sculptor's colleague and neighbour Abbott Fair.

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Probably more than any other American artist,

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Sync Gaudens was responsible for inventing the look of the fantasy Hekla Angel that remains familiar today as witness,

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for example, Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Whether nude, like Diana, the classical goddess of the hunt,

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a as a weathervane to the old Madison Square Garden or clad in celestial garments and victories in wings like victory, same gardens is idealised.

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Females serve a strategic purpose for his contemporaries.

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Their pulchritude. That is their consummate physical beauty.

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Counterbalance male hardness and sharp and hard heartedness.

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It infused manly universes, a business, sports, politics and war with an offsetting and stimulating femininity.

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Without these angels and goddesses, the public sphere in public sphere given such compelling visual form by saying Gaudens and his fellow

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American Renaissance artists and architects might have seen too nakedly masculine driven in blunt.

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Saying Gaudens in Carp, Inc., an angel into his finest public monument, which marks the summit of his career.

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This was the memorial erected in Boston to Colonel Robert Gould, Shaw and the Fifty Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry,

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the first regiment of black soldiers organised in the North during the Civil War.

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Shaw died in 1863, along with a great number of his men during a futile charge against Fort Wagner,

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a Confederate stronghold strategically situated on a small island outside Charleston, South Carolina.

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The battle is imagined here in this lithograph, the 1990s.

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Set within a columned granite and marble frame, St. Gaudens is large bronze relieve rest between two stately elms on Beacon Street.

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Rest between two, a elam's on Beacon Street above Boston Common, bearing laurel and poppy, symbols of victory and death.

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The angel is stern and gaunt, not an aethereal, sweet faced innocent girl, but a mature woman hardened by sorrow.

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She soars like a ponderous cloud over the heads of the men whom St. Gaudens depicts solemnly marching off to war.

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Unlike victory in the Sherman Memorial, who conspicuously keeps her distance from the great wire at her heels, the angel,

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the Shaw Memorial presses close to the men beneath her as if she were an abiding thought emanating from their heads.

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Indeed, the Shaw Memorial is an altogether different sort of public monument from those we have considered.

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For one thing, it's a relief sculpture rather than a freestanding sculpture.

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As such, its mood is reticent. Feragut commands from the quarterdeck of his imaginary ship, Lincoln steps into immortality.

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Sherman launches himself into the winds of war and Diana holds court over the imagine over the Empire City.

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There is none of that self projection with the Shaw Memorial. Colonel Shaw seems almost to resist the viewer's attention.

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He's, quote, Lean is a compass needle to borrow Robert Laws arresting phrase,

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which refers not only to Shaw's physical being, but also his but also his moral bearing laws.

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Well-known poem from 1960 for the Union Dead describes the read the writer on the freeze as having,

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quote, an angry wren like vigilance, a Greyhound's gentle tautness.

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He seems to wince at pleasure and suffocate for privacy.

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As we saw earlier, Bas-relief was the type of sculpture with which Saint Gorton's achieved his most personal portraiture.

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Think back to the Stevenson Memorial, the Stevenson Medallion, or the beautiful portrait of young Sarah Redwood Lee.

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Even though the Shaw Memorial is a major monument in the heart of a busy city.

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It's intimate and does. It is intimate and discreet.

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More along the lines of the private and introspective Adams Memorial.

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Surely this anomaly serves stems from the unusual nature of its origin, like feragut,

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Sherman and Lincoln Shaw was commissioned by prominent citizens wishing to commemorate a great military leader.

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But the difference here is that the group, the commission, the Shaw Memorial,

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was comprised of high minded Bostonians, so several of whom had been ardent abolitionists.

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These men were disheartened by the recent demise of reconstruction and the resultant amnesia that was causing Americans to misremember the

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war as a glorious contest between chivalrous heroes rather than the terrible but necessary cataclysm over slavery that it actually was.

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The commissioners saw it a memorial that downplayed military valour and paid

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tribute instead to the cause for which the young colonel and his coloured troops,

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as they called them, had rendered their lives.

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Hence the sorrowful rather than celebratory nature of this monument in the ongoing battle of symbols and ideas as to how the war would be remembered.

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It insisted, especially with the angel of death hovering overhead, that failure, tragedy and loss are inalienable aspects of any victory.

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A related explanation as to why this monument looks so different from the others, so much more personal.

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Is that the family of the individual being honoured was actively engaged in the creative process.

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Shaw was a 26 year old,

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Harvard educated Boston Brahmin raised by a family long committed to the belief that slavery was wrong and should be abolished at any cost.

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When the war ended and proud New Englanders called for his moderate murdered body to be

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disinterred from its mass grave and reburied with honours in the ancestral city of Boston,

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his parents refused, explaining that their son would have preferred to remain with his men, even in death.

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Later, when St. Gaudens received the commission for the memorial and planned to make a heroic equestrian statue of IT Shores,

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parents intervened again.

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They objected that their son was not an important military commander, and a statue portraying him as a hero and a horse would be inappropriate.

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Again, they insisted that he would have wished to remain with his men and to that ex.

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And to that end, Saint Gaudens dropped the idea of a freestanding equestrian statue and began designing a multi figure monument instead.

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This necessitated a freeze because under the financially restricted terms of commission,

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it would have been impossible to sculpt a whole ensemble of statues in the round in the design that resulted.

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Shown here in the gilded plaster cast version now at the National Gallery in Washington,

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the men and the rifles bunch up behind the mounted colonel like a steel spring compressed in space, ready to uncoil.

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A sharp, angular linearity defines the scene. But these hard angles are relieved at intervals by the circular bedrolls,

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canteens and drum, as well as the curving flanks of the horse and his involution tail.

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Others softening elements are the mantle of the angel which undulates in is which sorry,

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which undulates in a sweet Raisi swoop and the elongated arch that encloses the freeze.

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Shaw's charger's seems more emotional than the Colonel or any of his men.

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The scene is fraught, but all the human agents within it exhibit self-control equivalent to that of the writer over his mount.

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Indeed, one of the most innovative aspects of the Shaw memorial was its dignified individualising of the black troops.

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S. guidance has given each of the 16 or so fully or partially visible faces distinct characteristics, offering the viewer a range of race appropriate.

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But also age appropriate facial structures and types.

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Thus, for example, he suggests that while some of the older soldiers haven't touched a razor in years, some of the younger have yet to use one.

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The reason it took St Gordon's 13 years to complete the commission, by far his longest period of gestation,

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is that he sculpted some 40 portraits, studies of African-American heads before arriving at the much smaller Codrea faces.

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He incorporated into the final version. Sad to say, Saint Gaudens entertained some of the typically racist attitudes of his time and place.

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And yet, as the art historian Kirk Savage has persuasively argued,

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the internal logic of the piece compelled the sculptor to transcend his own limited and bigoted beliefs.

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For there was no way that he could pay tribute to Colonel Straw without treating Shaw's men with equivalent seriousness and respect.

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Whatever his intentions may have been,

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the work that resulted is unique in 19th century American art for the dignity and depth of humanity of accords, people of African descent.

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In this, he was going very much against the tide of racial representation in late 19th century America,

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where black soldiers were typically depicted as lazy, overgrown children incapable of standing on their own two feet.

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Indeed, simply by putting his African-Americans on their feet instead of on their backs, bellies or knees.

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He afforded them an unusually high degree of respect.

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With its multiple rows, military figures lined up for abreast, each row dissolving from high to low relief into the bronze background,

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the Shaw Memorial provides a plethora of individual faces gathered across the flat,

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two dimensional surface of the picture plane and the narrowly raking three dimensional sculptural space.

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Separate and unique, but also join closely together, these faces constitute a single collective face,

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a united front wedged between an adverse past and a future that is perilous, but also potentially propitious.

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Unlike the fatalistic black man alone and adrift in shark infested waters in Winslow Homer's 1899 allegory of racial futility,

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the Gulf Stream, the black men here face their destiny with firm resolve and collective action.

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The monument was unveiled on Memorial Day, 1897.

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Exactly 34 years after the event that commemorates commemorates, which is not the attack on for Wagner,

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but rather the departure of the regiment from Boston six weeks earlier.

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The sculptor chose that is to emphasise a moment of hope and promise rather than defeat.

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Nonetheless, sadness pervades the work.

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All who attended the unveiling would have known that this march to war resulted in the death of the hero and the decimation of his regiment.

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That regiment long disbanded the veterans of the fifty fourth reconvened for the unveiling.

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These were the survivors, first of the bloody assault, the claim their comrades and their leader,

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but also of the hardships of being poor and black in post reconstruction America.

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They were survivors, too, of old age.

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The relief depicts them as mostly young, marching south with their leader on Beacon Street away from the Massachusetts statehouse,

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as they had done on a bright May morning in 1863. Now, on a misty grey morning in May, a third of a century later, none of them young anymore.

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The veterans paraded uphill along the same street. St. Gaudens, shown here at approximately this time, was moved by their presence at the ceremony.

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Years later, he recalled watching them confront the monument, quote,

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The impression of those old soldiers passing the very spot where they had left for war so many years before thrills me.

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Even as I write these words, they seemed as if returning from the war, the troops of bronze marching in the opposite direction,

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the direction in which they had left for the front, and the young men there represented now showing these veterans the vigour and hope of youth.

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Over the years, the Shaw Memorial elicited strong responses from artists and intellectuals who were captivated by its visual and moral power.

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The speakers at the dedication ceremony were two famed moral leaders, Booker T. Washington,

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the most honoured spokesperson for black America and the Hot Lips hopes that slide was supposed to come earlier.

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But here we go. The speaker the dedication ceremony were to famed moral leaders, Booker T. Washington,

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the most honoured spokesperson for black America, and the Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James.

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James vehemently opposed the jingoism and sabre rattling that would eventually lead the nation into a brief war with Spain,

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followed by a prolonged conflict with native insurgents in the U.S. occupied Philippines.

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He took the occasion of the dedication ceremony to remind his audience that Colonel Shaw and his men had fought and

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died for a great principle the abolishment of slavery and not for personal gain or glory or nationalist pride.

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In the years to come, the Shaw memorial served as a muse to a range of American writers and artists.

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Charles Ives set it to music in 1911, is the singer.

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The title was The St. Gaudens in Boston Common, which he later included in his three places in the New England.

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Ralph Ellison was guided by it as an artistic model when he began writing his novel about racial injustice.

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The Invisible Man, which was published in 1952 and in 1960,

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Robert Lowell wrote his searing poem about it for the Union Dead, from which I quoted earlier.

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Eventually, however, the memorial fell into a sad state of disrepair.

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In 1973,

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it's blighted condition inspired collaboration between the essayist and ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein and the photographer Richard Benson.

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Kirstine wrote eloquently of the ongoing relevance of the monument in the post civil rights era,

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and Benson's photographs turned it stained and streaked surfaces into hauntingly beautiful images of decay.

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Once the monument was returned to pristine condition in the early 1980s and the

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previously apps and names of the fallen foot soldiers were inscribed in its base.

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The memorial attracted newfound attention. Here we see a visit to it in the early 2000s by members of the famed Boys Choir of Harlem.

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Shortly after the monument was restored, a film producer caught sight of it one day as he was crossing Boston Common.

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He commissioned a script to be written and eventually the movie Glory, inspired by the monument, came out to much acclaim and popular success in 1989.

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It's easy to be critical of the film as an exercise in white liberal paternalism since it required the presence of a white movie star.

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Matthew Broderick in order to receive financing. Here I show you.

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Broderick on the right, made up to look like Shaw as seen in the period photograph.

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Problematically,

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the narrative of the film implies that black Americans could not attaining their goals without the intervention of noble minded whites,

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that they were not agents of their own destiny.

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That said, the filmmakers goal was to make the foot soldiers, not Shaw, the collective hero of the tale.

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As film historian Bruce Chadwick has noted, Shaw was, quote, the character with the most lines, but was not the focus of the story.

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Clearly, the actors, costume designers and makeup artist scrupulously studied St. Gaudens vision of Shaw and

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the enlisted men of the Fifty Fourth when creating the lead characters in the drama.

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I was tempted to show you some clips from the film, but. To something else.

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So here we see Morgan Freeman in one leading role. And Denzel Washington in another for which he won his first Academy Award.

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You succeeded in its goal of rescuing the anonymous black soldiers of the fifty fourth Massachusetts from oblivion.

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They were not anonymous, of course. We have and have always had historical documentation, names,

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ranks and home addresses of those who served in the regiment, but like foot soldiers in any army at any time.

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The men were little more to us than names, ranks and addresses.

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Here is where creative art, unlike social or military history, provides a distinct service.

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It fabricates characters. It invents them or Kabulis them together from bits and pieces of real life people or from other fictional characters.

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In so doing, it allows us to imagine the inner life of individuals who actually did exist but left little or no firsthand record of their experiences.

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The soldiers in bronze, like those in the movie, are emotionally compelling compositors fictionalisation that nonetheless strike us as real.

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Glory is the only instance I can think of in which a major Hollywood film was based on a work of sculpture.

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To be sure, it was based as well on historic on historical characters and events, including Shaw's letters to his family.

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Nonetheless, the closing credits of the film roll over a tight frame on the freeze of the Shaw Memorial in prominent,

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if tacit, acknowledgement of sync on it. So here we will try to run the.

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The Boys Choir of Harlem singing. I think you've seen Gaudens is one of the most important 19th century progenitors of American cinema.

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His work anticipates Hollywood aesthetics. He was a master of the close up before that term was invented.

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He can also be thought of as having pioneered the low angle establishing shot so familiar

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from the classic Westerns of John Ford and others as here in this monument to the Civil War.

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General John Logan as a lone rider on a hill.

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A figure similar to Saint Gaudens in that regard is the late 19th and early 20th century book illustrator Howard Pyle,

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the subject of my Teryl lecture in this auditorium a week from today, as I hope to have shown,

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St. Gaudens was remarkably a remarkably sensitive and acute portraitist in bronze.

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He was an extraordinary technician with an ability to compose on both an epic and an intimate scale.

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He memorialised the rich and famous. But also, as with the ancillary figures of the Shaw memorial, the underprivileged, an unknown.

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He was a giant of Gilded Age America, one of the most enduring artists of the American renaissance through the nuance

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and stylistic versatility of his sculptural move over a series of decades.

379
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He shaped the way the generations of Americans and visitors to America encountered its history.

380
00:48:41,990 --> 00:48:47,570
He pictured the nation in ways that we are still wrestling with today.

381
00:48:47,570 --> 00:48:54,330
Then again, perhaps Americans are not sufficiently sufficiently wrestling with these matters.

382
00:48:54,330 --> 00:49:01,020
We can argue about the ultimate ideological meaning of the Shaw Memorial in terms of its racial politics.

383
00:49:01,020 --> 00:49:06,810
Is it a work of paternalistic white liberalism in which a privileged Caucasian rides literally,

384
00:49:06,810 --> 00:49:13,380
above and figuratively on the shoulders and backs of African-Americans or to the contrary?

385
00:49:13,380 --> 00:49:20,910
Does it constitute an eloquent and powerful call for racial dignity and respect at a moment in U.S. history,

386
00:49:20,910 --> 00:49:30,420
when Jim Crow racism characterised by systemic violence against African-Americans seems once again to be on the rise?

387
00:49:30,420 --> 00:49:36,060
However, we might wish to answer the question of the sculpture's racial implications.

388
00:49:36,060 --> 00:49:57,533
It seems indisputable to me that the Shaw Memorial, more than any other public monument in America as citizens to take race seriously.